A 13-Year-Old Killer: The Murder of Derrick Robie

0:00 In 1993, Savonor New York had fewer than a thousand people in it, and four-year-old Derek Roby probably knew a lot of them by name. On August 2nd, he walked one block to summer camp by himself for the first time ever, and he never arrived. The boy who stopped him on the way lived in the same town and was 13 years old. Savonor sits in Stubin County, in New York's southern tier, close enough to the Pennsylvania line that it barely qualifies as a trip. Fewer than a thousand people lived there in 1993. The grocery clerk knew your mother. Kids rode bikes until the street lights came on, and screen doors stayed unlocked because there was never really a reason to think about it. Derek Joseph Roby was four-years-old, and by the account of most people who lived there, maybe the most recognizable person in town. He would post up on a corner in Greek people as they walked past, and the town handed him a nickname without even holding a vote on it. They called him the unofficial mayor of Savonor. His dad, Dale, coached T-Ball, which was Derek's favorite thing in the world.

1:27 He would step up to the plate and announce to his mother, "This one's for you, Mommy." Doreen Roby says that he usually delivered. That morning, Derek was headed to a recreation program at the park down the street. The park sat one block from there front door, and Doreen walked him there every single day. This particular morning, she had his baby-brother Dalton and her arms. Dalton was pretty fussy that day. Derek looked up at her and said, "It's okay, Mom. I'll go by myself." She gave him a kiss and told him that she loved him. He set it back and hopped off down the sidewalk. About a mile of childhood away, a 13-year-old named Eric Smith was riding his bike around that same park. Eric was born January 22, 1980. His biological father left right after he was born, came back long enough to father Eric's sister, and then he took off for good. His mother remarried. Eric later told a parole board that home involved emotional and physical abuse, and that he came out of it carrying a load of anger he had nowhere to put. School handed him more of the same.

2:33 His mother documents spell out the specifics of what he got picked on for, which was his low-set ears, his thick glasses, his red hair, his freckles, and his height. He described himself years later as a kid who got tormented almost every single day. Then there's this part of the story that gets skipped over in shorter versions of it, and this is a shorter version, but I'm not going to skip it. Starting at around age 9, Eric had been hurting animals. He shot birds with a BB gun through rocks at frogs, and in 1989 he strangled a neighbor's cat to death. He was smoking cigarettes daily around that same age. But summer of 1993, a kid who had spent years on the receiving end of bullying had started doing it to smaller kids. On the morning of August 2, before he ever saw Derek, Eric had gone to that camp specifically to bother the younger campers, and the camp leader had kicked him out. He was riding away on his bike after getting kicked out when he spotted a four-year-old walking alone in the same direction. Eric talked Derek into taking a shortcut through the wooded strip near the park. What happened in there took just a few minutes.

3:44 Eric strangled him until he lost consciousness, then dropped a rock on his head. Court records document that he sexually abused the body afterward. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head with asphyxia as a contributing factor. Eric walked away, came back about five minutes later to confirm Eric was dead, then he left again. Around 11 that morning, Doreen left and went to pick Derek up. He had never arrived, and nobody at the program had seen him. The search pulled in the whole town and then some. Roughly four hours later, searchers found Derek's body in the woods, a short walk from the park where his father had taught him to swing a bat. Savona did what most small towns would do.

4:29 Everyone assumed an outsider, a drifter on the highway, someone passing through who picked the wrong town and kept driving. The possibility that it came from inside the town stayed off the list because the town's whole understanding of itself depended on that being impossible. State police interviewed about 500 people over the next following days, and in a town of under a thousand, that means they talked to almost half of everybody there, and they fielded several unrelated complaints about parking. This is 1993, so the toolkit is knocking on doors, filling out paper forms and relying on people remembering things. Eric was interviewed more than once. He said that he had not seen Derek. Then his story shifted. He did videotaped walkthroughs that failed to line up with the physical evidence, small mismatches that kept nagging at investigators without adding up to anything usable. The case cracked open because of a family friend named Marlene Heskel. On the night of the murder, before anyone knew whether they were looking for an adult or a child, Eric asked her a question out of nowhere. He wanted to know what happened if it turned out to be a kid. She told him a kid would need psychiatric help. He said, "Oh, okay." And he walked off. She couldn't shake it. She also remembered Eric being near the scene that day. She went to Eric's mother and his mother brought him to the police command post. The investigator later said that Eric appeared to totally enjoy talking about the murder and did not want the conversation

6:01 to end. On August 8th, six days after the murder, Eric confessed to his mother, his grandfather and his great-grandfather. The great-grandfather was a retired sheriff's deputy who tried to arrange something quiet with authorities. The district attorney had no interest in quiet. State police took a formal statement. Eric was read his rights in language written for children with family in the room, and then he talked for about three hours. Keep in mind, Eric is 13 years old. Eric Smith became the youngest person tried as an adult for murder in New York State history at that point. His defense argued intermittent explosive disorder, a rare condition, hoping for a manslaughter verdict that would route him into psychiatric treatment. The prosecution's expert countered that the diagnosis is almost never applied to someone that young. Doctors ran brain scans and hormone panels, looking for a biological explanation, and they came up with nothing. The diagnosis that stuck were ADHD and depression.

7:03 The jury needed one day. On August 16th, 1994, they convicted him of second degree murder. On that November, he received nine years to life. The maximum New York had available for a juvenile murderer. His own attorney said publicly that Eric had a serious psychological issue that neither juvenile detention nor state prison was built to treat. Timing worked against him for reasons that had nothing to do with Savona. The mid-90s were the peak of the super predator panic. A Princeton academic published the term in 1995 and predicted tens of thousands of remorseless young killers roaming America by the year 2000. Juvenile Violet crime was already falling when he wrote it and it kept falling. And he eventually admitted that he got it all wrong. States passed the laws anyway. So Eric was set to be in prison for a long time. Eric became eligible for parole in 2002 and was denied ten straight times. Every two years, Dale and Dorine drove back into the worst days of their lives and asked the parole board of strangers to keep their sons killer locked up. Dale put words to something a lot of families carry, which is that he couldn't understand why the crime itself was not enough. They took it further and pushed for legislation to stretch the waiting period between hearings. Inside, Eric built a case for himself. He earned a college degree in Crusade Evangelism, talked about becoming a counselor for bullied kids, and described years of therapy. At his 11th hearing in October 2021, he mentioned a fiance, a woman studying

8:40 law who had started riding with him with questions about juvenile justice. He told the board that 13-year-old who took Derek's life was not the man sitting in front of them. They granted it. Savona held a peaceful protest that November. His release got pushed back months because he had no approved address, and he was denied permission to return to his mother's house. On February 1, 2022, Eric Smith walked out of Woodburn Correctional Facility at 42 years old and went to living Queens roughly 28 years after his arrest. Dorine Roby has said that she deliberately does not track where he is or what he does because she refuses to give him the space in her head. Derek would be 37 now.

9:24 Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, I'm the host, here's an email, subject, my mother-in-law, and the paranormal. Joe, I need to preface this by saying I am a rational person, I have an engineering degree, I do not believe in ghosts. That said, that's a wild way to start an email by the way. That said, my mother-in-law passed in February, and about three weeks later the smoke detector in the guest room she used to stay in started chirping. I changed the battery, it kept chirping, I replaced the whole unit, still chirping. The electrician came out, found nothing wrong, and charged me $180 to tell me that. My wife thinks it's her mom, I think it's bad wiring, we have agreed to disagree, you cover a lot of dark material and I imagine you hear from people who think they've experienced something. Where do you personally land on it?

10:29 I'm asking because you seem like someone who would give me a real answer instead of just going along with whatever I want to hear. Doug, in Wichita, Kansas. Doug, what a weird email. First, I'm sorry about your mother-in-law, that can't be easy, but also, I'm a little bit on your side here. Do I believe in ghosts? I think I do, but I don't believe in them in the traditional sense of some people when they die, their spirits kind of linger or whatever. I think personally this is going to sound really weird and if you've never listened to my podcast, "10 Minute Mystery" before, you can think why is he talking about this? I like strange things, I like the paranormal stuff. I don't think ghosts in the sense that we think of ghosts are family and friends that have passed and they are lingering. I think that they are demons. I don't think ghosts are a good thing, so I don't think that that's your mother-in-law chirping in the smoke detector. If it is something paranormal, I think it's something else. And I'll leave it there because I don't want to weird everyone out.

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